The HIT Lab NZ is offering exciting educational programs in Interaction Design. The key to our courses and projects are a multidisciplinary focus, collaboration with external companies and team work. You may have a bachelors degree in design or psychology and want to expand your expertise into the prototyping domain or vise versa. We encourage students from diverse backgrounds to join the laboratory. Students with expertise in philosophy, economics or sociology are as welcome as students with an engineering degree. It is the mix of backgrounds that makes our educational programs so special.

Projects in the lab require looking at the human users of technology and hence you will learn to design interactions together with the future users. The educational programs focus on three main areas of expertise:

Understanding Users

Design

Prototyping

Educational Programs

We offer a PhD program that enables you to explore a research question or problem in depth. A PhD typically takes three years you will be able to completely focus on your research project. The University of Canterbury has several scholarships available for PhD candidates and we post our funded PhD projects on our job board.

Our Master Program consists of a three month taught component followed by a nine month thesis project. You can complete your studies within only one year. Most of our thesis projects are in collaboration with external partners and we post our funded Masters projects on our job board. We also have dedicated scholarships for international masters students.

We are offering a summer course in December that allows you to gain a short but intense introduction into Interaction Design. It consists of a two weeks taught component and a design project. In 2013 we focused on Design Thinking. Stay tuned for the 2014 focus.

About the lab

The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) is developing and commercializing technology that improves human computer interaction and by doing so unlocks the power of human intelligence. The HIT Lab NZ conducts research with new emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality, Next Generation Video Conferencing, Immersive Visualization and Human-Robot Interaction. Interaction Design techniques are used to adapt these technologies to the needs of end users and solve real world problems. The end goal is to improve the user experience with technology.